Graphics applications have evolved to provide many different kinds of options to developers. Graphics applications allow developers not only the ability to create graphical objects, such as a depiction of a person, a table, or a chair, but also the ability to animate the graphical objects and to place them into scenes. As used herein, the term graphical object is an object in a graphics application that includes features that can be manipulated by the graphics application. As such, a graphical object can be fixed or animated. A person is an example of an animated object. A table and chairs are examples of non-animated objects. Typically, graphical objects are depicted as being part of a scene. Generally, a scene is a rendered object that includes a background, such as a rear wall, and graphical objects in front of the background. An example of a graphics application is 3d Studio Max® from Discreet®, a division of Autodesk, Inc.
In large production graphics projects, certain processes need to be performed repeatedly. For example, numerous graphical objects, such as tea cups, may need the same or similar types of processes applied to them, such as handles, quickly and easily. Other examples include, coordinating several processes, such as creating backgrounds and placing graphical objects on the backgrounds, installing the same files, such as images, in more than one graphics application, and placing graphical objects around another graphical object.
Two common ways of applying services to the graphical objects are (1) to navigate menus for the desired services, search in folders for dialogues, and move dialogues around, or (2) to have a tool bar of buttons where the buttons correspond to scripts. By clicking on a button, a dialogue box appears where the user specifies a target object that the script is applied to.
One way to expand the capabilities of graphics applications involves installation of additional features. For example, some plug-in developers provide additional features to graphics designers in the form of WinZip files. To install the features, a developer downloads a WinZip file from a third party developer's web site, opens the WinZip file, extracts files from the WinZip file, stores the extracted files on a hard drive and executes an installation program to install the features provided by the extracted files.
However, these approaches for applying services and installing features are manually intensive. Therefore, there is clearly a need for easily performing operations repeatedly.